This summer school, organized in collaboration with colleagues from Cheick Anta Diop University in Dakar, ONECCA, and the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, aims to create a space for meeting, dialogue, and research training between African and European students and young researchers.
This summer school, organized in collaboration with colleagues from Cheick Anta Diop University in Dakar, ONECCA, and the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, aims to create a space for meeting, dialogue, and research training between African and European students and young researchers. Location: Gorée Island/Dakar (Senegal) Historiography has shown that the history of accounting and statistics integrates into the broader context of the evolution of bureaucratic practices in societies that developed in Europe from the modern era, both in the world of merchants and proto-industrialized production and in state administration. However, as Caitlin Rosenthal emphasizes in her book “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management,” the practice of “government by numbers” (Desrosières) was also part of bureaucratic culture in the context of plantation production and the slave trade in the Atlantic world.
Thus, this summer school aims to decentralize geographically by focusing on statistical production and bureaucratic practices in the (post)colonial context (Atlantic and African space) between the 18th and the late 20th century. We choose a chronology of several centuries to integrate both the first and the second colonial empires and to examine post-independence African spaces. It will be a matter of exploring ruptures, differences, as well as forms of continuity, circulation, and legacies over time and spaces.
By focusing on the production of numbers, this summer school proposes to reflect more broadly on (post)colonial governance, its transformations over the long term, and the power relations it produces on a daily basis. Thus, by taking statistical and bureaucratic practices as a starting point, it is envisaged to show more broadly how counting or producing accounts and figures is, above all, a manifestation of power that allows classification, connection, hierarchy, but also exclusion and repression.
How did merchant accounting and official statistics develop in the colonial world (first and second colonial empires), and what role did numbers and statistics play in the development of independent African societies after the end of the colonial era? What professional culture accompanied the development of these bureaucratic practices in the economic world and state administration of the colonies as well as in the new post-colonial states?
The summer school “Bureaucratic Practices and Professional Expertise in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts (18th-20th centuries)” will seek to deepen these questions for 4 days by combining lectures and public discussions with seminars and master classes. It is aimed at advanced students (M2), doctoral students, and postdoctoral students in history and other disciplines of the social sciences, as well as professionals from the accounting and auditing world. By bringing together European and African participants, the summer school will contribute to training African and European students and young researchers in new approaches to the history of knowledge and administrative practices, currently much debated among specialists in European history and colonial history, which have significantly renewed the historiographical field in recent years.
This summer school is co-organized by scientific partners (Department of History of UCAD and the research group “Bureaucratization of African Societies” – CREPOS/IHA, Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, and the Institute of African Worlds – IMAF – in Aix-en-Provence) and organizations of accountants (EMPACTA e.V., Germany, and ONECCA in Senegal). By bringing together scientific actors and accounting professionals, this summer school will offer a space for meetings and exchanges between the academic world and professional actors specializing in statistics.